Yeah from what I can see the H67 chipset doesn't do very well for overclocking but theres no point in getting the 2600K if I can't oc. What do you mean by "on-die"? on board? i can't imagine it'll be very good, but it'll do till I get myself a decent one.

If you plan to add a GPU later on buy a Z68 chipset, you will get all the overclocking features of P67 and the ability to use your HD3000 at the same time. When the time comes you can upgrade and buy a dedicated GPU.

HD3000? Is that the on boards ports? The z68 looks a little outta my price range, but i have an old Nvidia card from a pc my friend played flight simultors and few years ago, reckon that'll do for a month or two?

HD3000? Is that the on boards ports? The z68 looks a little outta my price range, but i have an old Nvidia card from a pc my friend played flight simultors and few years ago, reckon that'll do for a month or two?

actually marvel se9182 offers the same performance as intel PCH P67, marvell caught up, and no the BIOS support for P67 is crap, as is the CPu micro code. The only thing the socket has going for it is its built in PCI-E controller which beats out X58 IOH and its high OCes, which are worthless anyways if you go subzero.

I can buy a 960 or 950 for $200 brand new at microcenter, the only thing more expensive is the board which is a bit more expensive than P67. If i wanna do a high resolution rig with SLI id go X58 with tri channel RAM.

X58 offers a lot to enthusiasts still, if you haven't noticed hwbot SB owns a few certain categories due to its PCI-E controller and 3D performance, but X58 still owns the rest.

990x or 980x can own SB in OCing as well. many of the 990x do 5ghz+ on air

FYI You can boot with 3TB+ drives on certain X58 boards.

For a mainstream guy id say go either way, X58 isn't that close to dead, its still alive and selling actually. There are many benefits a normal user might not consider, but if you need the best its still x58.

Thanks, to be honest I've never overclocked before, I work as as a telecoms engineer and which allows me to spend time maintaining the computers there. I'd get a serious talking to if I OC'd them aha, I'm pretty stuck for time, I just want a high performance pc that i can use when nessecary. I assume i7's were the way to go, (considered a amd 1100t for a while)
I probably won't OC, if i do it won't be to hard for fear of ruinning equipment
Do i want the 2nd gen for future proofing?
When are we expecting ivy bridge?

Isn't is needed that the software you want to use actually supports hyperthreading? I mean if the stuff you are going to do won't support it the leap from a sandy bridge i5 to an i7 is big in cash and not so much in performance then. The i7 here costs 75 euros more then a 2500k. Same as with the 6 cores. A friend of mine is a gamer (I'm not on pc gaming) and he says not many games support the use of 6 cores. And here the previous i7s are absolutely crazy expensive. Up to 900 euros for the fastest one.

Perhaps you need to think what you want from it and then go from there. Unless you just outright want to make the fastest one you can afford.